Breaking up means getting gulag’d by a revolution you thought you started.
It means punching someone right in their open surgery.
It means getting lasered into pieces but still needing to hold all your wobbly flesh-chunks in the shape of a person.
Breaking up means failing so badly they name the test after you.
It means getting electrocuted up through your own piss, and out through your words.
It means having to finally face up to the fact that the whole world is break-ups, and always has been.
Because
– hear me out –
death is just the universe breaking up with you.
Capitalism is just the means of production breaking up with you.
And depression is just your own brain breaking up you,
over and over,
like a donkey in a hall of mirrors kicking the shit out of itself.
Breakups can be good, and healthy, and necessary
– In fact, they rarely happen when they’re not any of these things –
but they still imprint their name in the wet concrete of your brain.
They still slice you up like deli meat, leaving you in the backseat of a hot car until you’re ruined and leaky and smell terrible.
They still get to the bottom of you, like an episode of Mythbusters about whether or not you’re a piece of shit.
Breakups still bankrupt the casino in your heart.
They still fill the pool of you with leaves and baby-turds.
They still fucking hurt a lot.
Because when you break up with someone you love, it’s not just them you’re breaking up with.
Breaking up with them means breaking up with every part of you that’s only there because they nurtured it.
It means breaking up with the gem-fusion person you thought you could be together.
It means breaking up with all the things you told only them, because even if you tell someone else in the future, no-one else will ever again be the only one you’ve ever told.
It means breaking up with your in-jokes, which is another word for ‘jokes that aren’t funny but you love each other.’
It means breaking up with their gravity on your mattress, and the sound of them sighing in their sleep.
It means breaking up with the person they used to let you imagine that you were.
Breaking up with someone you love means breaking up with love itself – because while every love is distinct, there is definitely some metaphysical origami going on that means that every love also contains within it the entirety of love, and so the loss of one means the loss of all of it, at least for a while.
It means breaking up with their reflection in your mirror, and your reflection in theirs.
It means breaking up with your confidence that you ever knew how to love them at all.
It means breaking up with the end of every day, and begrudgingly getting back together with the morning.
ada connor 